Why mother-in-law's favourite Schumacher will never be loved

Michael Schumacher has missed the bus. He is too late for this weekend's new series of Strictly Come Dancing and more's the blooming pity. It would have been fantastic for his image to be up there with Tarby and Smillie, not to mention Schmeichel, Ramprakash and DJ Spoony. The second we saw Schumi attempting to wiggle his pert little bottom and shimmy across the floor looking as uncomfortable as a man can get, we would have loved the guy - at last.

We adore seeing people being not very good at things, it's the new pornography. Any vulnerability of Michael's has been conspicuous by its absence and in the sweet artifice of reality TV, the man the Germans know as "schwiegermutter-liebling" would have become "mother-in-law's darling" for dear old middle England, too. Why have we never warmed to him? He is a genius; a virtuoso. He is three wins short of having more formula one victories than Senna and Prost together.

My colleague David Croft was talking to David Coulthard about him the other day and the Scot was blunt. "If I do a quick scan of my memory I don't recall him ever coming out and admitting he did anything wrong even when the stewards had penalised him. That's either a strong inner belief on his part even when the evidence of the governing body suggests he's done something wrong, or it's a strategy in sport on his part not to show a weakness."

So clearly, Schumacher doesn't wake up in the middle of the night racked with self-doubt but that kind of self-exaltation, if not a prerequisite, is certainly a prevailing characteristic of winners. Let's hope England's cricketers acquire a modicum of that self-belief down under in a few weeks.

Coulthard went on: "I've yet to see him apologise for anything that may have been deemed unsporting." Sorry is the hardest word but consistency is the watchword. One way or another the C word and Schumacher are never parted for long.

Tiger Woods, no less, was unstinting in his praise. "He's performed year in, year out, in the most globally watched sport of them all and under immense pressure. What he's done is phenomenal."

Woods went on to anoint the ruthless-relentless-repentless-machine as the best "sportsman" in the world - arguably contorting the definition of the word to the limits of verbal chicanery. It's not a description you hear readily tumbling from the lips of his F1 colleagues. Only last week Fernando Alonso articulated the paradox. "Michael is the most unsporting driver with the largest number of sanctions [against him] in the history of formula one. That doesn't mean he hasn't been the best driver."

It was a jarring eulogy from Woods especially, a man who in the past has been quick to point to the alleged transgressions of others. A few years back he accused Seve Ballesteros of having a tendency to cough on people's downswings. "Seve tends to get a little sore throat every once in a while," miaowed catty little Tiger, although the Spaniard has denied the accusation.

But we love Seve - so if Seve pushed the envelope as did Ali and as did McEnroe, why do they gladden our hearts while Schumacher deadens them? Even the drunken, women abusers Gazza and Best are celebrated for their flawed characters as much as their fabulous skills.

And yet this "mother-in-law's darling" who gave $10m to the Tsunami appeal fund gets no slack. This man who drove his car, in Richard Williams' memorable words "the way the violinist Maxim Vengerov plays a Bach partita, with a visible passion pushing him up to and sometimes beyond the limit of his instrument's capabilities", is seen as a callous, charmless German. And there's the reason why, dangling provocatively on the end of the previous sentence.

I'd been in denial about it until I spoke to the brilliant historian and cultural commentator Richard Weight. "It's the German thing." said Richard immediately. "We pick our villains and there is still nothing like a German one. He is the Red Baron."

This, Richard argues, is an example of declining but vestigial Germanophobia and Schumacher is a kind of subconscious reincarnation of Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the first world war ace, sitting smugly in his cockpit just being bloody infuriatingly good at what he does and bloody infuriatingly German.

It's on the way out that anti-German stuff and, as I've said here before, the World Cup helped enormously to accelerate the process. It's a shame Schumacher is going first.

Ice-cold decisions that wreck the dreams of Olympic hopefuls

There is a chill wind blowing through the rinks and ranks of ice skating at the moment. Harding and Kerrigan this ain't but it's a hell of a row. After their climb up the rankings Sinead and John Kerr, the Scottish brother and sister pair, have been awarded what could amount to £500,000 from UK Sport over the next four years. It's to finance their performance programme but it'll also enable them to live as full-time athletes.

They are never going to be Torvill and Dean but, as the Kerrs' website rightly trumpets, they are doing well. "Sinead and John Kerr are the three-time British ice dance champions from Scotland. They placed eighth at the Europeans and are rated top-10 in the world. They represented GBR at the 2006 Olympics in Italy and placed 10th." Emyr Roberts from UK Sport's Performance Directorate told me: "This is about bringing people to podium level." Unfortunately it has brought many of our leading skaters to the point of apoplexy.

One told me: "We are furious. We can't believe they're putting all their eggs in one basket. It would be great if they got £400,000 and they could split £100,000 between all the rest of us so we don't have to pay all our own travel expenses, our own petrol and all our hotel fees." And those costumes don't come cheap.

The only other disbursements go to what Roberts describes as "the most precocious talents" - six teenagers who have been identified as real prospects for 2014. "There is only finite funding," he said. "We've got to be ruthless. Our investment is geared around strong medal prospects. This is the harsh world of Olympic success." Seeing it in those terms it is hard to disagree but there are other costs. The morale of the sport has taken a hammering and so have dreams.

Old square eyes' luck is out in search for a new job

Sinatra sang it. "Stick with me baby, I'm the guy that you came in with, luck be a lady tonight." I can't quite see Sven in the Rat Pack. Tord Grip is no Sammy Davis Jr and Sammy Lee no Deano, but old square eyes is desperate to get back into big-club management and in defending his record as England boss he's been pining for one particularly beautiful but frustratingly elusive broad. "My time with England didn't have the support of Lady Luck," said Sven. Ah, regrets, he has a few. If only he'd seduced her as well.

Murray's ray of hope

It was, of course, P G Wodehouse who said that it is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine. Andy Murray has had a bright and shining summer but if only he'd lighten up just a bit. He needs to get one of those gizmos that several of his fellow countrymen have invested in. It's a wee thingamajig you put in your pocket and whenever you need to smile you just press a red button with your thumb. Granted there are a few design hiccups - Marti Pellow's won't turn itself off and Gordon Brown's keeps going off at the wrong moment, but used sparingly it would be the making of the sullen jock.